Cynicism is Asking Questions

It occurs to me that what I've been ranting about here could be considered a form of cynicism--that is, the philosophical belief that underestimates or totally devalues the conventional or prevailing valuations of mainstream culture or times, in regards to a particular virtue. Cynics ask questions about why we value the things that we value, and what good it really does us to value them how we do. For instance, is the inflated caricature of adulthood superiority over adolescents due to the fact of its moral superiority, or is it simply due to the fact that adults have always been the ones drawing the lines? Is the inflated caricature of childhood innocence and purity due to the fact of its moral neutrality, or is it once again due to the fact that adults have always been drawing the lines? Is so-called "parental intuition" so unshakable, so natural, so perfect in our minds that we have to ignore its irrational foul-ups? Is the fetishization of male under-performance really any use in ensuring equality between the sexes? There are countless new values that need to be questioned out there, just as wealth, fame, power, and consumerism all have in their turn.

Modern culture all but instructs us not to question, and many people will call you out as an "extremist giving strength to other extremists" for even dignifying their extremism with a response. Many will stop being your friends when you so much as call into question that which they hold so dear, or at least, that which they want to pretend doesn't exist. I say that not dignifying the gleeful, ignorant, or dishonest statements floating around these days is to be giving them greater potency. It's to be letting them off easy. What harm does questioning extremism do when extremism is flawed by default, especially when one questions it with focused and passionate rational resolve? It is like saying that we must not hurl our poison-tipped arrows at some vicious beast, for to do so will "only make him mad." Why put up with the torments of a vicious beast all your life under your inaction, when you can both "make him mad" and swiftly kill him dead with your words this moment? All the victors of history managed to get things done, despite calls from the crowd to let the extremists off easy.

Cynicism is often thought to be a doctrine of pessimism, when in reality it is the opposite. It could be argued that nothing gives someone a clearer perspective about how to value that which actually needs to be valued, and how to toss off that which in the end is a mere construction of society, than it. People have gone to their deaths or have lived vain lives over ideals that are silly and flimsy, and in the modern world, people have managed to carry out all manner of destruction on premises that are just as silly and flimsy when opened up to simple scrutiny (marriage as an institution, for instance). Writer Lenore Skenazy over on the Free Range Kids website writes endlessly about the ways that society has become destructive toward children in its efforts to mediate their every step and breath, and in so doing, does the world a service every time she questions something. She could be yet another "child defender" and preach protective paranoia with smug self assurance, but instead, she prefers to do parents and the world a service simply by questioning our deepest held prejudices and fears over child safety. The act is a literal pealing back of the eyelids from the realm of an illusion to the world of the causal and the physical, and where consequences matter.

It has been my work to take this line of argument even further--to question not just our valuations of protecting children, but our valuations of children and young people themselves. I've gone on record before in questioning whether or not the standard of beauty in culture necessarily relates to what our commercial-driven media apparatus has been convincing us it is. First and foremost, the female body is no longer a dignified subject matter because of it, and has instead become synonymous with hawking products. That doesn't carry a connotation of beauty in my perspective, although many others have been tricked into thinking as such. I could just as easily though make the argument that children are beautiful--and do it not from a purely "parental perspective", but from a similar exploitative beauty standard perspective as we see in commercial media--and I would be no more wrong. Women are not any standard of beauty and children are not any standard of innocence and optimism. Our valuations on human beings and other entities and objects are not correct simply because we think them.  There was a time when men were considered the standard of beauty (ancient Athens), and children were considered "little savages," for instance. Time changes things, and if you don't think it will, wait another three hundred years.

Those who vigorously defend the endless "innocence" of a child are doomed to see nothing but the infantilization of that child instead, once he or she has grown. Everything we think requires re-thinking and questioning, lest we become stuck in a similar cultural rut--a state of societal arrested development. Learning requires accommodating new information. Stagnation only requires needless oath-taking to age old traditions, premises, and other illusions of value.

Indeed, the greatest personal affirmation is achieved when one decides to shirk off all that is superficial and focus on instead what really matters--whatever that may be for each individual. This was the driving principle behind the existentialists. All that is superficial tends to be what we have in common with everyone else. We all believe children are human beings and should be treated with dignity and respect, so to think ourselves righteous simply for upholding that is superficial. What really matters as far as that is concerned, is how we behave around and respond to children in real life, whether we know them personally or not. The same principle goes for all people, animals, and the earth itself. It's not enough to uphold something, one has to question whether simply upholding it is indeed virtuous, and if not, scrap it and focus on realigning one's values with inter-human bonds where virtues are shown, rather than "upheld." You can not get there without being cynical towards the out-dated and counter-productive traditional expectations of what we are to "uphold," and particularly those sentiments we are expected to "uphold on the highest." One could argue that we are expected to uphold nothing higher than our constructions about children, childhood, and their well being, so therefore, nothing is more deserving of our criticism.

Cynicism is the only progressive tool we have, so perhaps even it deserves question. I'm not so sure about its emphasis on the natural world as being particularly virtuous, for instance, because the natural world is in fact no more virtuous than the civilized world. Childhood is no more virtuous than adulthood, and adulthood no more than childhood--so even our valuations of our revaluations can be subject to further questioning... but the point remains still--to question.